Posts by kwikbreaks

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Ditch the VM phone and use a VOIP service instead. Vonage costs £5.99 a month for 2000hours of UK geographic calls. 0845 0870 a few pence a minute and no connection charge. You also get free calerid for with VM charge £2 so the actual cost is ~ £1 for virtually unlimited landline calls.

well I reckon...

Distance matters

The Andromeda galaxy is so close (couple of million light years) that the local gravitational attraction rate overcomes the expansion rate of the universe. There is something called the Local Group which are all gravitationally bound. I cba to look up how big it is but from memory its several tens of millions of light years across I think.

FTL

I'm guessing the FTL stipulation was to allow the lifeboat starship to outrun the GRB and avoid fried nads so the eventual target planet could be repopulated. Possibly the GRB would be powerful enough to ensure only one (or less) generations on your ark.

Think smaller...

The IBM 360/30 I first worked with had a total memory of 32kB iirc. The DOS operating system was 10kB and if you ran the Power spooling system (print only - jcl went in via a card reader - I don't recall if punch was spooled or not) that took another 10kB. That left 12kB for programs. Some had to be run without Power

Hmmmm...

VM have never mentioned to their customers that the Superhub problems are related to other nearby APs before to my knowledge. In fact they have never published anything about known problems or fixes applied - no release notes of any type have ever been made public SFAIK. The last tidbit on their forum explaining why there was yet another delay was that they had discovered a memory leak in the WiFi driver (presumably the driver for the internal WiFi card). I wonder just how much they are making up as they go along.

They encouraged suggestions for additional features (you can't even override the VM DNS for instance) yet despite months of development nothing is being provided other than a GUI option to turn off the routing features and use it as a plain modem and the actual functionality for that is present in the current firmware. My betting is that the youth experience kid they've got coding it has spent all this time tracking down one of the probably many bugs in the code. At least when it finally gets released it will be possible to just bypass all that dodgy router functionality and use one that works.

Productivity?

In the 1970's I worked in a UK based car manufacturers spare parts division as a sysprog on their Sstem 360 mainframe. There was a huge section on one of the buildings filled with well over 100 accounts clerks pouring over the computer printouts.

I went back there contracting in the late 90's. That same area plus more was filled with outsourcing company IT staff. I expect by now all the IT has been offshored so I don't know staff that area will house now but I guarantee it will still be full. I doubt that the business has grown at all as vehicles are a lot more reliable these days.

Didn't somebody once say that the work expands to fit the tme available. They weren't wrong.

There can be only one

With some things it seems there is room for only one. Why would somebody sign up and spend time on a revived MySpace when all their friends are on FaceBook?

Another possibly less valid example - why use a second tier auction site when, despite its many faults, eBay is where you'll sell quickest at the best price or most easily find what you want at a low price?

errr...

You don't get to access their "Live" services (part of which is theHD traffic service which collected this data) for free - you have a subscription account and the unit logs you in over GPRS every time you power it up.

Privacy..

Ah yes privacy - it was the fact that you could see patients in the background that caused raised eyebrows when a nurse at my local hospital got her jugs out on nightshift for a facebook picture - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3358681/Facebook-ban-for-nurses-after-online-flashing.html

Yes indeedy patient privacy is very important. Getting bedpans to them before they shit the bed while the nurses flash their titties apparently isn't.

Open networks

A casual stroll with an Android phone running Wardrive will show plenty of open APs so this report doesn't surprise me and expect few others either.

Apart from BTFON which is supposed to be open the most common easily identified SSID are the various Belkin defaults so presumably they come with WiFi on and no security set by default. It's a fair bet that the router passwords are default too so should bandwidth thieves find that the router owners usage is slowing down their torrents unduly locking out the owners should be pretty trivial.

pricing

it doesn't cost the ISP any less to provide 1Mbps ADSL than 20Mbps ADSL though. In fact it can easily cost more as there is more chance of a long line developing a problem and generating a support call. It is the volume downloaded that is the cost differentiator not the speed it gets downloaded at (within reason and on the same technology).

Yes I thought that too..

I did do a half-hearted search and found nowt. Watching the power meter would provide stiff competition for this box of cress I'm watching grow after the unfortunate accident when I painted the wall so I could watch that dry.

Don't forget ...

> Think of that when you are enjoying a nice meal, and the government will cream off nearly 20% of the price in taxation.

Well yes you pay the VAT which is a tad shy of your 20% but probably what you meant. Don't forget though that the price you pay is really almost entirely made up of peoples wages and profits all of which are set higher than they need be so the taxman gets a rake off. Plus you had to earn significantly more than the money you handed over as well assuming you paid tax yourself.

By the time you've regressed every part of the costings I'd say the tax is nearer to 100% than 20%...

Idiot

And what 1.5GB cap might that be?

There is no cap on 50Mbps and I very much doubt there will be one on 100Mbps.

On the 20Mbps product (a speed I can get most of the time) you can download 7GB between 10 and 3 and a further 3.5GB between 4 and 9 daily without getting throttled. Outside those times it is open house That's a lot of iPlayer / Linux ISOs / Porn / Warez / whatever and if it isn't enough you only get speed capped at 5Mbps which is more than a lot of ADSL lines can deliver.

Sure when the whole country has FTTH then VM might be in trouble at if they haven't increased their network but I expect even suits will understand that and dribble investment into their network at a speed that keeps them solvent.

they have to..

at least I think (and hope they do) Certainly if you get flashed by a speed camera they have to issue a ticket within two weeks (researched after getting flashed but no ticket arrived).

I moved house and somehow the usual reminder from the garage that my service and MOT were due went astray and I drove a couple of months without realising I had no MOT - my home-work trip is 35miles along several major roads including motorways. No ticket arrived.

Porkies

"My local exchange is massively congested, can't even watch low quality iPlayer in the evenings. I have tried compaining many times but I get "not our problem guv" from the ISP"

They are telling you porkies. Assuming the length of your phone line or poor internal extension wiring isn't the problem then it will be that the cheapskate ISP hasn't bought sufficient capacity from BTw rather than some mythical exchange problem. Time without number people on "congested exchanges" find that the problem goes away when they swap to a halfway decent ISP - do some research.

Just what is the point of ...

20GB a month equates to basic surfing/email plus a bit of iPlayer / YouTube - you can do that OK on a connection that delivers (a genuine) 2Mbps.

The only real advantage of 40Mbps over 2Mbps is for downloading as you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference when browsing so if downloading is severely restricted why bother paying a premium for this other than for willy waving rights?

At least one LLU operator offers a pretty genuine no caps, no throttling, and from my own experience little contention service. Any BT based service tends to be abysmal and unfortunately that boils down to most UK ADSL services. The BT infrastructure may be very old fashioned but their pricing structure certainly isn't.

Logic

I've seen quite a few recommendations for MSE but I really don't see why I should trust one MS product to protect me from malware that exploits glaring security holes in another MS product.

Ruling out a good AV product on the grounds that you are too stupid to understand the warning message that you need to request a new auth code seems to be just about as daft as the requirement to download a fresh code.

I look forward to getting the latest Avast - I've never had a problem with it and never had a nasty while using it.